A tale from the darwin awards website

[Woodzie]

Three hale and hearty young men had finished their basic training. Before heading out to their respective assignments, they decided to spend their few days of leave with one's grandmother, who lived in the town where they had endured basic training. The privates descended upon Grandmother, who filled them with home cooking. Grandmother had a swing job to make ends meet, so the privates were left alone late into the night.
Grandmother had three children. To commemorate the birth of each child, a pine tree was planted in her front yard. In the fifty years since the last tree was planted, the pines had grown considerably. The middle tree now blocked the view from the living room window. To repay Grandmother for her kindness, the privates decided that they would cut down that tree, letting the sun and the view into the room.

A case of beer went into the planning.

To keep the 50-foot tree from crushing Grandmother's house, the privates reasoned that they would tie a rope to the top of the tree and pull the rope away from the house as the tree was cut.

The middle pine tree was slightly closer to the house. The privates climbed the end tree, wound a rope through its upper branches, and threw the rope to a private in the middle pine tree. He tied the rope to the middle tree. By this device, they could pull the rope from the ground, and the middle pine tree would fall away from the house. And the privates were also clear of the path of the falling tree.

Climbing a pine tree is a very sappy event, and scrapes and gouges are infliced by the natural roughness of its bark. But the hale and hearty privates completed the preliminaries, and the middle tree was lassoed and levered by the rope running through the end tree.

So far, so good.

Two privates were situated on the ground, each straining to pull the pine tree away from Grandmother's house. The third private revved his 20 HP chainsaw and started to cut. Lo and behold, the tree actually fell away from Grandmother's house! However...

The rope-pulling privates had wrapped the rope around their waists, not considering that the falling pine weighed several tons. As the middle pine tree fell, both privates were ripped off their feet and smashed through the branches of the end pine tree. At the height of their acceleration, they broke through the top branches of the tree, and were briefly airborne before being jerked toward the earth when the middle tree hit the ground. The privates entered into Darwin history, either on the way up through the branches, or on the way down to the cold, hard ground.

The event spoke for itself.

[Woodzie]

Another tree related one

An enterprising lumberman jacked up the rear end of his pickup, and swapped one of the rear tires with a tire rim. He attached one end of a rope to the rim, and the other end to a large felled tree. He put the pickup into gear, apparently expecting the rim to act as a makeshift rope crank that would pull the tree up the steep embankment, saving him lots of sweat.
A great idea? Not if you're reading it here! You see, the tree vastly outweighed the truck. The man was standing with one foot on the ground and the other foot on the accelerator. When he gunned the engine, the tree acted like an anchor, and the truck yanked itself backwards. The open door rammed into him, and he was swept over the embankment along with the pickup.

When the dust settled, our lumberman had entered the great beyond. But his escapade served as a warning for others. The next lumberman cut up the tree where it lay, and carried it off.